An ultra-condensed history of computing since the 1980s for those who weren't paying attention

Here is the summary:By the '90s microcomputers (computers based on single microprocessors) grew big enough to run Real OSes with memory protection etc. Most 20th century vendors did not have such things in their 1980/1990s OSes and lacked the ability to add them without destroying backwards compatibility.The few OSes that could use this were niche things and either very expensive, and so died out, or they did next to nothing while also being almost impossible to use, and so nobody used them. Acorn, Commodore, and Atari died. Apple nearly died. It had fired its boss, and he went off and built a new company with a super-hi-end all-singing-all-dancing computer. It flopped but the CIA bought loads of them and kept the company just about afloat. Intel, and separately MS & IBM, tried to design their way out. They all failed. Even IBM struggled. Meanwhile... DEC inspired most of the industry but was even worse at marketing than Commodore. Unix, CP/M, DOS, NT, all were built on DEC designs…